So I play an Ancients Paladin in one of my games and have the 7th lvl feature, which is resistance to magic damage caused by spells. Sounds great on paper.
The issue is that in the 2+ years I’ve had this feature, I’ve never once gotten to use it because any damage that we’ve taken is from a creature feature, not a spell, even if it functions like a spell. As we all know with Monsters of the Multiverse, this is going to be becoming the standard way of stat blocking monsters in the future, so the situation is just going to be exacerbated in the coming years of playing the character.
I’ve talked with my DM and we both agree that this is an issue as anyone having a character feature that’s essentially dead is a problem. However, we don’t really know what to do to fix it in a way that makes it satisfying and not overpowered or pandering (ie: artificially adding in spellcasters and say they’re casting spells just so I get to use the feature). And since this isn’t the main paladin subclass, we likely won’t see if WotC decided to address it until next year when PHB 2024 comes out… which is another year of feeling like there’s a dead feature in my character.
Now, it is possible that the feature only exists to deal with friendly fire. Fortunately or unfortunately, my group is very good at avoiding friendly fire by having an evoker wizard who negates all AOE damage for us, a Bearbarian as the other front liner, and good tactical positioning of spells from the other spellcasters (one of whom is a moon druid and often in melee). If this is the case, it still feels bad as it just isn’t something that occurs in our game.
I have tried doing some searching, but most discussion on this topic tends to be about what the feature actually affects (just damage from spells). Does anyone have any thoughts on how to adjust the feature so that it can actually be utilized against creatures going forward, but not be so overpowered that it just turns into resistance against magic damage.
Thanks in advance for any help. We’re quite stumped on this one.
I’ve got an Oath of the Ancients paladin in my group. I play it as if the thing behaves like a spell, we treat it as a spell for the purposes of this feature.
If I were the DM I would just rule that monster abilities that resemble spells are spells. Would involve some adjudication but seems workable. Have you discussed this?
there are precedents for things interacting with “magical damage”, such as heavy armor master. That’s what removing the “from spells” portion of the ability would do, though “magical damage” is a little bit vague and requires the DM to make judgement calls pretty often.
Well it doesn’t have to be all magical damage. Just the ones that are clearly spells but WotC is refusing to label them as such.
The simplest answer is probably just that the DM is more generous with what it works against. It doesn’t have to apply to all damage that’s magical, like magical weapon damage, but I think it’s pretty easy to reasonably say “This enemy mage is using the ‘ball of fire’ action in their statblock, sure that counts as a spell.” If it still feels underpowered, be more generous with it. If it feels overpowered, be less generous with it. Might take a little tweaking but there’s a sweet spot in there somewhere.
I think this mismatch will likely be fixed in OneD&D, as the Ancients Paladin is revised to have a more broadly applicable feature.
My suggested fix would be to make it resistance to all the common draconic damage types. Fire, Cold, Lightning, Poison, and Acid.
